Found Footage Films

Well, at least they were nice enough to label it, as well as what to do with the tape.

"Every frame of this movie looks like someone's last known photograph."

— Joel Hodgeson, Mystery Science Theater 3000, "Manos: The Hands of Fate"

Movies that are shot to resemble actual camera footage recovered from an event. They typically contain a fair bit of Stylistic Suck, owing to the conceit that they are being filmed by people who aren't professional filmmakers.

A large number of films using this approach tend to be horror movies; the approach lends itself nicely to low-budget film-making and it positions the audience right in the center of creepy and terrifying events. The concept became a sensation after The Blair Witch Project, though it goes back to Cannibal Holocaust in The '70s, at least as a technique of film. In other mediums it goes back at least to the early 20th century. The majority of H. P. Lovecraft's works were presented as found manuscripts, reports, or other such things made to look like an actual first-hand account with the untold horrors. Dracula was written in this style, the story being told through a number of diaries and newspaper articles giving the appearance that Bram Stoker had collected them to document the story.

The subgenre saw a resurgence in popularity starting at the end of the Turn of the Millennium within the horror genre thanks to the success of Paranormal Activity, along with the decreasing cost and increasing availability of digital cameras. Other recent, non-horror films utilizing the format include Chronicle, Project X and Best Night Ever, as well as the TV series The River.

Compare Mockumentary, Based on a True Story, Vlog Series. See also Apocalyptic Log, which lends itself nicely to this style of filmmaking. Analog Horror also falls in a similar vein. The text equivalent is Scrapbook Story. The term "found footage" can also refer to footage that is re-appropriated (that is to say, treated as a found object), and consequently "found footage film" can also refer to a video collage.

---

Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Flag - not a live-action production, but uses the same presentation style

Films — Live-Action

• ABCs of Death 2 (for the B and V segments)
• Afflicted
• Alien Abduction (2014)
• Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County
• Amber Alert
• American Descent
• The Amityville Haunting
• Apartment 143
• Apollo 18
• As Above, So Below
• Area 51
• The Bay
• Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
• The Bell Witch Haunting
• Best Night Ever
• Bite - though only for the opening scenes. The rest of the film employs a more conventional narrative.
• The Blair Witch Project - the Trope Codifier for much of the genre.
  • Blair Witch (the direct sequel to The Blair Witch Project, made by the team behind V/H/S)
• Cannibal Holocaust - believed to be the first ever film of this particular genre, though only half of the movie is the actual found footage.
• The Cannibal in the Jungle
• Chronicle
• Cloverfield
• Creep (2014)
• The Darkest Dawn
• Deadstream
• The Devil's Doorway
• The Devil Inside
• Devil's Pass
• Diary of the Dead
• The Dinosaur Project
• Earth to Echo
• End of Watch: It's zig-zagged, since it heavily uses In-Universe Camera rather than solely using Found Footage
• Europa Report
• Evidence (Switches between traditionally-filmed scenes of police looking through crime scene footage and the footage itself.)
• Exhibit A
• Eyes in the Dark
• Found Footage 3D (a parody of the genre)
• The Fourth Kind
• Frankenstein's Army
• The Frankenstein Theory
• Gags the Clown combines footage from phones, body cams, a news team, and a podcaster to narrate the story of the eponymous Monster Clown.
• The Gallows
• Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum
• Grave Encounters
  • Grave Encounters 2
• Guinea Pig: Devil's Experiment
• Hell House LLC
  • Hell House LLC
  • Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel
  • Hell House LLC 3
• Home Movie
• The Houses October Built
• House Of Temptation
• Hungerford
• I Am Alone
• Influenza — Korean short film consisting in its entirety of security camera footage.
• Into the Storm (2014) (Mostly.)
• Lake Mungo
• The Last Broadcast
• The Last Exorcism (but not the sequel)
• The Lost Coast Tapes
• Lucky Bastard
• Lunopolis
• Man Bites Dog
• Megan is Missing
• Mermaids: The Body Found
• The Monster Project
• Mr. Jones (2013)
• My Dad's Tapes has the protagonist uploading the titular tapes to YouTube while investigating the contents.
• Nightlight (2015) subverted this trope: it looks like Found Footage, but is really an Impending Doom P.O.V. from the perspective of a haunted flashlight.
• Noroi: The Curse
• Occult
• The Outwaters
• Paranormal Activity
• The Paranormal Diaries: Clophill
• Paranormal Prison
• Phoenix Forgotten mostly follows a pseudo-documentary film style as a young woman searches for her missing brother and investigates the 1997 UFO phenomenon known as the "Phoenix Lights" (which is the last thing her brother was looking into before disappearing), which then becomes a true-blue example of this trope when she finds the camera her brother's group was carrying the day they vanished and plays the video inside, which filmed how the whole lot of them ended up victims of an Alien Abduction.
• The Possession of Michael King
• The Poughkeepsie Tapes
• Pretty Dead 2013
• Project Almanac
• Project X
• The Pyramid (At least in the beginning; the amount of found footage gradually decreases throughout the film until it's almost entirely traditionally-shot by the climax.)
• Ratter
• [REC] (at least up until halfway through the third film)
  • Quarantine (an American remake of [REC])
• RÉEL
• Savageland Framed as a documentary, though found photos take up most of the limelight. An actual found footage appears at the end.
• Series 7: The Contenders
• Sinister mixes found footage with a traditional storytelling method as a framing device.
• Spree
• The Taking of Deborah Logan
• Tape 407
• This House Has People in It
• The Troll Hunter
• Trash Humpers
• Undocumented
• Unfriended: It's zig-zagged, since it employs a Skype conference in real-time rather than using Found Footage.
  • Unfriended: Dark Web
• VHS
  • V/H/S/2
  • V/H/S: Viral
  • V/H/S/94
  • V/H/S/99
• The Visit
• Vlog: It mostly consists of footage from Brooke's vlog posts, the killer's web videos, and a true crime TV show. However, there a few scenes that do not fit this format.
• The Wedding Video (up until the end)
• Willow Creek
• Windigo
• The Witch Files
• WNUF Halloween Special
  • Out There Halloween Mega Tape
• Zero Day

Literature

• House of Leaves is a book about a review of a movie that used this. Except it was all true. Maybe.

Live-Action TV

• 2013 (a Belgian TV series)
• The Doctor Who episode "Sleep No More"
• The Australian TV series Jeopardy (not to be confused with that one) made heavy use of found-footage early on, when it was more Blair Witch-esque.

• Lost Tapes
• The River
• Siberia (framed as a Reality TV series)

Music

• The video for "One Last Time" by Ariana Grande, which was done by the writer of Chronicle above.
• The video for "Beauty and a Beat" by Justin Bieber, whose synopsis is that it is Bieber's "personal footage" that was stolen and illegally and distributed by an "anonymous blogger".
• The video for Ludacris' "How Low", in which a trio of teenage girls film themselves summoning Ludacris in the mirror, Bloody Mary-style, by dancing in front of it.

Radio Drama

• The 1949 Suspense episode "Ghost Hunt" features a similar premise involving an audio recording.

Video Games

• Amanda the Adventurer
• Black Snow – the game's entire story is what Jon Matsuda's camera recorded before "you" find it.
• Luigi's Mansion 3 has a brief segment with found footage. Professor E. Gadd had sent a Toad to retrieve an important gadget to help Luigi and had the Toad record himself during his search. The Toad gets ambushed by ghosts and had to flee, dropping the gadget and the camera in the process. Luigi has to use the recording to figure out where Toad and the gadget are.
• Michigan: Report From Hell is essentially a playable found footage movie, with the player controlling the cameraman of a news crew in a horror setting. What's strange is that the identity of your cameraman changes depending on what ending you get.
• Outlast (stylistically invoked with the video camera you use for night vision)
• Paranormal (a haunted-house investigation video game)
• Resident Evil 7: Biohazard features this in some moments, where you can watch videos left behind by people who'd gone through the house before you, all of which are fully playable.

Web Video

• Alan Long
• Clear Lakes 44 - although the in-story source of the footage is unclear, as it explicitly does things no "camera" should be able to.
• End Times switches between found footage from the survivors and vlog-style commentary from the Archivist.
• The 15 Experience (a found-footage short film presented as an online experience)
• Hallowed Worldly
• Hi I'm Mary Mary
• The Indiana Jones Interrogations
• The Joker Blogs - mostly the first season, much less so in the second.
• Kane Pixels' The Backrooms
• Marble Hornets, and by extension, most video series set in The Slender Man Mythos.
• Truth in Journalism
• The West Records

Western Animation

• The Scooby-Doo Project (a Deconstructive Parody of the genre).
• Looney Tunes:
  • In ''The Adventures of the Road Runner" (a proposed 25-minutes series pilot), the Coyote shows us he keeps a photographic record of his activities in pursuing the Road Runner so he can isolate his mistakes and correct them. He has movie cameras strategically placed throughout the desert. (Some of the scenes were repurposed for the later cartoon "To Beep or Not To Beep"; the segment itself was re-edited in 1964 as "Road Runner A-Go-Go.")
  • "Prehysterical Hare" has Bugs discovering a reel of movie film from prehistoric days. It focuses on Elmer Fuddstone and his hunt for the sabertooth rabbit.

---